Websites have grown considerably more complex since the early days of the Internet. Substantial processing power is required to present and view modern websites, in particular websites which are relatively poorly designed. Many websites have numerous embedded applications. Furthermore, in certain cases, the user's equipment itself may be performance limiting with respect to accessing particular content, for example high-definition video content. In other situations, Internet/website access performance could be limited because too many applications are being run simultaneously on a user's device, or the CPU may be a relatively older and slower model. Often, a user viewing a poorly designed or overly complex webpage or using dated equipment to access modern content will experience poor performance, which may then be incorrectly blamed by the user on an Internet service provider or generically blamed on “the network.”
Mistaken diagnoses by a user of poor “network” performance can, in some cases cause unnecessary work for an Internet service provider (ISP). For example, technicians may be called out to the customer premises and/or service locations at which the ISP's network equipment might be located, in order to monitor and diagnose problems believed to be with network connectivity or network performance which are actually the result of relatively poor website performance or relatively poor user device performance.
Hence, there is a need for robust website performance tracking solutions and means for conveying this information to end-users and website owners.